The Russian government has blamed the widespread outage of several popular mobile applications on a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
The outage affected a number of messaging apps and online services, including Telegram, WhatsApp, Skype, Wikipedia, Steam, Discord, Twitch, and VKontakte – a Russian social network. However, people in Moscow reported regaining access to services when using a VPN, prompting some to speculate that Russian authorities were to blame for the outage.
Read more…
Source: MSN News
Related:
- Over the Kazuar’s nest: Cracking down on a freshly hatched backdoor used by Pensive Ursa
October 31, 2023
While tracking the evolution of Pensive Ursa (aka Turla, Uroburos), Unit 42 researchers came across a new, upgraded variant of Kazuar. Not only is Kazuar another name for the enormous and dangerous cassowary bird, Kazuar is an advanced and stealthy .NET backdoor that Pensive Ursa usually uses as a second stage payload. Pensive Ursa is a ...
- Government-backed actors exploiting WinRAR vulnerability
October 18, 2023
In recent weeks, Google’s Threat Analysis Group’s (TAG) has observed multiple government-backed hacking groups exploiting the known vulnerability, CVE-2023-38831, in WinRAR, which is a popular file archiver tool for Windows. Cybercrime groups began exploiting the vulnerability in early 2023, when the bug was still unknown to defenders. A patch is now available, but many users still ...
- Zero-days for hacking WhatsApp are now worth millions of dollars
October 5, 2023
Thanks to improvements in security mechanisms and mitigations, hacking cell phones — both running iOS and Android — has become an expensive endeavor. That’s why hacking techniques for apps like WhatsApp are now worth millions of dollars, TechCrunch has learned. Last week, a Russian company that buys zero-days — flaws in software that are unknown to ...
- Rules of engagement issued to hacktivists after chaos
October 4, 2023
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has, for the first time, published rules of engagement for civilian hackers involved in conflicts. The organisation warns unprecedented numbers of people are joining patriotic cyber-gangs since the Ukraine invasion. The eight rules include bans on attacks on hospitals, hacking tools that spread uncontrollably and threats that ...
- Russia: Leonardo’s air booking system resumes after cyberattack
September 28, 2023
Russian state conglomerate Rostec said on Thursday it had restored normal operations at its Leonardo air booking system following what it called a “massive cyberattack from abroad”. “The cyberattack has been successfully repelled,” Rostec said in a statement. It described the incident as a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Attack”, in which the attacker floods a server with ...
- Hackers break into Russian database with data on hundreds of millions of flights
September 23, 2023
Ukrainian hackers have hacked into the Russian database of the Sirena-Travel booking system, obtaining information on 664 million flights over the last 16 years. They also obtained the names, phone numbers and document numbers of the passengers. News of this was posted on the Telegram channel of the hacker community KibOrg. An unknown group called Muppets, ...

